The eBallot and the Bullet

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The eBallot and the Bullet

ELECTION 2000

Call it a coup for the electoral future. By the end of Election Day, some 250 members of the armed services, mobilized as part of a pilot project run by the Defense Department's Federal Voting Assistance Program, will have changed the direction of history, casting the first electronic ballots counted in a US federal election. The joint action, aimed at making absentee voting easier for men and women in uniform, comes in response to a 1996 survey in which a quarter of all military voters said they didn't participate in the election because their absentee ballots arrived too late.

Armed services personnel from four states will evote via the Pentagon's Public Key Infrastructure, an electronic system used by the military to send confidential messages worldwide. Ballots will travel through the secure pipeline to election officials in the voters' home states, kept separate from voter identification and thus ensuring the same secrecy provided by paper.

The test should serve as a call to arms, helping sway election officials to adopt evoting on a broader scale. Though these 250 ballots may not tip the balance in this year's races, they could have a big impact on elections to come.